The Reevaluation Of Wen Taizhen Jade Mirror’ Story

Guan Hanqing, a great drama writer of the Yuan Dynasty, wrote works with high artistic value and rich cultural meaning. However, many of his works, such as “Snow in Midsummer”, “The Rescue of a Courtesan”, “River-watching Pavilion”, “Xie Tianxiang”, and “Jade Mirror” lead to controversies on their ideological and artistic value in the academia. This article focus on “Jade Mirror of Wen Taizhen” and discusses its cultural purport, artistic achievements and related disputes. The whole article is divided into three parts.The first chapter studies its culture purport and is divided into two sections. Section I researches the thinking tendency of the play and includes two parts. The first part is about the mindset of story of Jade Mirror in A New Account of the Tales of the World by combining the marriage customs and thinking trends in the Wei and Jin Dynasties. The second part analyzes Guan’s living environment and bohemian personality, showing the consistency in thinking tendency of the drama "Jade Mirror" and the original "Jade Mirror". Section II studies the ideas of marriage in the play and proves Guan’s admiration for love reflected by the marriage ideas and Wen Qiao’s attitude towards Qian Ying.The second chapter studies the artistic achievement of this work and is divided into two sections. The first section analyzes the success of the drama in characterization and includes rewriting Wenqiao’s image as an everyday people and Qian Ying’s solid image. Section II studies the comedy value of the play through analysis in dramatization of the plot, integration of secular aesthetics and master of emotions of viewers.The third chapter studies the controversies of the play and includes two sections. The first one analyzes the reasons for the change of Wen Qiao’s image in comments of different times. The second one discusses whether the play contains tragic factors and whether Wen Qiao gets married by cheating. It also contains views of scholars’ comments, such as pointing out the impact of class analysis in judging whether the play is a comedy or a tragedy and hypercorrection in literary criticism.